this one of them could swim.  She was making for sea, a stone’s throw off the direction of the boat.  Before his wits had grasped the certainty possessing them, fiery envy and desire to be alongside her set his fingers fretting at buttons.  A grand smooth swell of the waters lifted her, and her head rose to see her world.  She sank down the valley, where another wave was mounding for its onward roll:  a gentle scene of Weyburn’s favourite Sophoclean chorus.  Now she was given to him—­it was she.  How could it ever have been any other!  He handed his watch to little Collett, and gave him the ropes, pitched coat and waistcoat on his knees, stood free of boots and socks, and singing out, truly enough, the words of a popular cry, ’White ducks want washing,’ went over and in.

CHAPTER XXVII

A MARINE DUET

She soon had to know she was chased.  She had seen the dive from the boat, and received all illumination.  With a chuckle of delighted surprise, like a blackbird startled, she pushed seaward for joy of the effort, thinking she could exult in imagination of an escape up to the moment of capture, yielding then only to his greater will; and she meant to try it.

The swim was a holiday; all was new—­nothing came to her as the same old thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-mind—­had left her earth-mind ashore.  The swim, and Matey Weyburn pursuing her passed up, out of happiness, through the spheres of delirium, into the region where our life is as we would have it be a home holding the quiet of the heavens, if but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the whole frame, equal to wings.

He drew on her, but he was distant, and she waved an arm.  The shout of her glee sprang from her:  ‘Matey!’ He waved; she heard his voice.  Was it her name?  He was not so drunken of the sea as she:  he had not leapt out of bondage into buoyant waters, into a youth without a blot, without an aim, satisfied in tasting; the dream of the long felicity.

A thought brushed by her:  How if he were absent?  It relaxed her stroke of arms and legs.  He had doubled the salt sea’s rapture, and he had shackled its gift of freedom.  She turned to float, gathering her knees for the funny sullen kick, until she heard him near.  At once her stroke was renewed vigorously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called, ‘Adieu, Matey Weyburn!’

Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able to bring down on her:  she swam bravely, and she was divine to see ahead as well as overtake.

Darting to the close parallel, he said:  ‘What sea nymph sang me my name?’

She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him:  ‘Ask mine!’

‘Browny!’

They swam; neither of them panted; their heads were water-flowers that spoke at ease.

’We ‘ve run from school; we won’t go back.’

’We ‘ve a kingdom.’